Badly thought out ideas ruin this movie

Rating: Null/10 (8 December 2004)

A number of problems spoiled this movie for me so much so that I really struggle to watch it any more.
The story is very derivative and that in itself isn't a problem but there are a number of ill conceived ideas within the story that really annoy me.
Firstly, any government research laboratory that was engineering a biological weapon such as rage would have far more security than one technician. So, the whole idea of three animal rights activists breaking in and freeing the Chimps was ludicrous. I know that nothing else was shown and it is possible that there was more security but this should have been more than implied  a simple way of getting around this would been to have had an accident happening with one of the scientists  have one of them get bitten which would have made far more sense but would also have been a bit more poetic.
Another major problem with the movie was the speed at which the virus infected its victims  you get bitten and within seconds you are an unreasoning creature who only exists to infect others. So, how would that kind of pattern spread much further than the South of England let alone the rest of Europe and possibly the world? I mean the infected didn't seem to have any real sense of purpose apart from their rage so if an infected person was bitten at an airport then they wouldn't have boarded a plane and even if they had then they would have infected the entire plane  including the pilots eventually and the plane would have crashed. Same with any for of transport  the virus would not have spread too far at all. Of course  this could have been solved in my opinion by establishing that the individuality of people's metabolisms meant that some people were infected in seconds  with some it took hours. This would have meant that the virus could have spread and it would have also created a lot more tension in certain scenes.
There were other things  the male character who initially saved Jim told a story about how he survived a mass attack of the infected in Waterloo station (or whatever station it was) and how he survived by climbing onto a kiosk stand. So, did this mean that once the infected had infected everyone at ground level then they would have seen him seven feet off the ground and decided that he was too high up?
London was deserted, which made for some eerily beautiful and evocative shots  but surely there should have been hundreds of bodies lying about the place? Not everyone would have survived the attacks and there would have been no-one to have disposed of the bodies.
The roads to Manchester were deserted  again, there should have been cars everywhere. In fact at one point a character says that under normal circumstances it would take around six hours to get to Manchester but in this case who knows? Well, judging by the emptiness of the roads then it would have taken about three hours. At no point until they arrived at the roadblock were there any signs that the country had been infected by a super plague. No other roadblocks, no military vehicles burnt out or abandoned  hardly any infected  the list goes on.
This film which has some nice ideas and beautiful shots seems to fumble absolutely everything that it does. Cliché is heaped upon cliché and ultimately doesn't make an awful lot of sense. The finale with Jim becoming Martin Sheens character from 'Apocalypse Now' makes no sense  a bike courier who has, after all, been in a coma for a month suddenly becomes fit and capable enough to take out some trained soldiers? Again, this could have been solved by having the house at the end being occupied by other survivors  maybe with one soldier in charge. The whole, clichéd, idea that the military would have gone insane in a month was tired and slightly insulting.
It's a shame because I love post apocalyptic thrillers but this one was let down by some poorly thought out ideas.